I was curious if anyone has logged any real data on the proper way to use acetone with your gasoline.

From what Ive read, you need to clean out your gas tank in your car.

Then remove the ethanol from the gasoline, which can be done by adding over 30% water to the gas, shaking it up, then pouring the mixture out. Easy way to do that would be a clear tank with a ball valve on the bottom to drain out the water/alcohol mixture. I was surprised at how easy it was to do this, there are several youtube videos that are interesting.

After doing this, your octane would be lower since the ethanol is out. If using 87 octane with 10% ethanol, it would be down to 84-84.5 ish octane rating.

Next step would be to add Toluene to the gasoline. 10-20% depending on what octane rating you want to achieve. I'm not sure exactly how much. 20% would be what I would use.

Then add 1-3 oz acetone to 10 gallons and record results.

It is my understanding that simply adding acetone in todays 10% ethanol blend of gasoline will actually hurt mileage rather than help it. I was just curious if anyone else has went through this trouble and recorded any results.

It just occurred to me that if I bought 89 mid grade gasoline, separated the ethanol from it, the octane would be around 86.3. With a quart of xylene or Toluene, would bring it up to 87, starting out with 10 gallons.

Well there is some science to the whole acetone thing. It changes gasolines surface tension and supposedly reduces unburnt fuel. Some people swear by this process.

I'm just wanting to see if there is any truth behind it. Ive known that ethanol in gas reduces mileage, and when acetone is added with gasoline+ethanol blend, mileage goes down, but when you add acetone to ethanol free gasoline, in theory, mileage should go up.

I wouldn't recommend this. Acetone is a hellacious solvent, even more so than ethanol. It will pick up everything in your fuel delivery system that's been left there over the years and clog the crap out of your filter, lines, injectors, etc...

I wouldn't recommend this. Acetone is a hellacious solvent, even more so than ethanol. It will pick up everything in your fuel delivery system that's been left ther

Yes, and that's what all the armchair theorists said to me when I tried it a few years ago. I did it for over a year, no damage, and I've put more than 40k miles on the car since then. The fuel lines are plastic, and the only plastic that acetone eats is clear plastic. It comes in the stores in plastic. Why would you theorize that it eats plastic? It does, but it eats cheap plastics that would decay from gasoline as well.

Anyway, to answer the OP's question: Yeah I did it. The claims are exaggerated. I kept it up for over a year- this was before E10 was the only fuel we had here. After E10, I noticed a drop in fuel economy. Prior to that, the increase was minimal at best, consistently 3 mpg, maybe a bit more. Not super duper outstanding for the PITA it causes. Since you haven't tried it, I can tell you where the problems are. Adding X amount per X gallons sounds easy- but tell me this, when do you ever completely empty your tank? You don't, and that means that the acetone level builds up over time. Too little acetone- no effect, too much acetone- negative effect. What I finally did, was carry a small container around with me, and I drew graduated lines for 3.5 oz which is what I discovered was optimal for my vehicle. After 2-3 tanks, the fuel economy dropped sharply. I could tell this by the time I used up my first 1/4 tank, so I'd go fill up with straight gas to even out the fuel economy.

After I kept it up for a while, I discovered that it simply wasn't very economical after figuring what I spent monthly on fuel, and what I spent monthly on acetone. It would only be mildly economical when fuel was over 2.50/gal, and saved something like $30/mo at 3.00/gal. Now that you'd have to drain out your fuel- that would be ridiculously silly difficult and annoying IMO.

I also looked into, but did not build (need money for bills) a brown's gas generator to hook up into the car- the hydrogen booster. From what I researched, you're better off working on a much easier water/alcohol vapor injection system. From my armchair research, gains were equally as good with simply water vapor injection as would be with the hydrogen generator- and much lower cost. I'm still working on proving that one. One thing I do know (because I have done this incorrectly a few times) is that once you finally get the WVI working correctly, you're going to need an EFIE to adjust the O2 sensor reading if you want to see real gains. Proper experimentation would require a data logger to keep track of spark timing, and you'd just slowly lean out your mix until you ran into spark knock. Then back off a few degrees, you don't want to put your engine in a situation where your mix is so lean that the -10 degree retard that the ECU does won't put you back in a safe place to drive home and figure out what has failed- or more likely, fill your WVI canister. Tons of people who try this use Isopropyl alcohol, but the effects are the same regardless of which you use- so I use Denatured alcohol that is 50/50 E and M. It's cheaper, and you can save more by purchasing gallons at a time from a hardware store.

I'm not trying to put down the H2O2 generators, Brown's gas, or hydrogen boosters. Those do seem to work when coupled with EFIE and other ways to trick your EFI. However, I think the H is just combining back with O to make water again.

Some interesting research for you- look into the P-47 Thunderbolt and water injection. Water injection is old, and some people with big boost turbos use water/meth injection so they can run more boost on lower octane fuel.

Finally, ignore all armchair theorists- especially those who agree with you. There's a lot of stuff out there, some of it seems fantastic, however when you get around to actually doing it, you discover that although the results you want might be obtainable, it's not going to be as simple as explained.

I don't really consider myself an armchair theorist, I work with high vacuum systems all day and use acetone and ethanol as solvents. I did not claim that it would eat plastic, I said it would pick up all the crap left in the system and carry it at a much higher rate than normal to the filter, lines, injectors, etc...

If you have a squeaky clean system to start, no problems. He has an '03. I was merely raising the possibility that he will give himself a clogged filter for no reason.

First of all, don't assume that marina gas is alcohol free. I used to work for a major marine engine manufacturer and boats really use so little gas compared to cars that if the refiners are adding alcohol to the gas in your area, they're adding to all the gas and the tanker just hits the marine between gas stations.

Second, it's news to me that hydrocarbons have surface tension; I always thought that was a function of the polar-covalent bonding perculiar to H2O.

Finally, how can the acetone both be consumed and build up in the tank? At one point the OP says you have to add some acetone with each fillup, then he says you have to do straight gas because of buildup.

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